The convenience of shopping online has turned the business of ecommerce into a multi-billion dollar industry. Today's consumers typically purchase items regularly over the Internet to save the hassle of going to the store, to order the item at a lower price, or purchase an item they otherwise could not locate at their local store. It is quite common for an ecommerce site to have a global presence and offer products and/or services to consumers in multiple countries. Payment processing services can be used by an ecommerce site to enable this global presence that was previously impossible. In fact, by using these payment processing services, anyone can sell pretty much anything online and have a third party collect payment for the item.
As these successes of online shopping have increased, so have the complexities in dealing with these payment processing systems. The payment process has become problematic for various reasons. First, is extremely tedious to add new payment types because of the different regulations and procedures involved in each payment type. Even the same payment type must be handled differently in many different countries. Examples of payment types include Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, etc. Second, different payment types require different user interface flows with failure scenarios, and so on. The user is provided with a different user interface depending on what type of third party payment processing system is used. Third, each payment provider implements their own set of requirements for communicating with them. If you want your ecommerce site to integrate with multiple payment processing systems, you must write custom code to integrate with each of these systems and follow the specific communication and other requirements they may have. The end result of these problems is that it is not uncommon for it to take several months just to add just one new payment type to an existing ecommerce system.